[HN Gopher] Lotus 1-2-3
___________________________________________________________________
Lotus 1-2-3
Author : tosh
Score : 122 points
Date : 2023-05-09 11:35 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (lock.cmpxchg8b.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (lock.cmpxchg8b.com)
| jpcosta wrote:
| This is fascinating, but at the same time I got to ask. Wouldn't
| it easier for a person as experienced as Tavis Ormandy to simply
| write a console version of a spreadsheet software from scratch
| using a modern stack?
| bombcar wrote:
| Yes and no - 1-2-3 is an extensively advanced piece of software
| that took thousands of man hours to get where it was.
|
| You could write 20% of it in a few days, maybe 50% in a month,
| but that last bit would take ... thousands of man hours.
| guestbest wrote:
| Off topic, but the other day people were wondering why Microsoft
| did users stayed on the platform when operating systems like the
| Amiga, Mac and even NeXT existed and it was because the terminal
| user interface is good enough for many people.
|
| Great work by the author. I really like hearing about extending
| the lifespans of DOS applications.
| cameldrv wrote:
| And price, and gobs of network effects. Macs were much more
| expensive than PCs, and if you were working in an office with
| multiple computers, being the only one with a mac was a huge
| pain in ways that don't matter today.
|
| The main way to transfer files in the 80s was floppy disks.
| Most PCs in the 80s had only 5.25" floppies, and Macs had 3.5".
| Even if you had a 3.5" drive though on your PC, the Mac had a
| much different format. There was some software that let you
| read Mac disks on a PC, but it was somewhat flakey, and then
| you were left with the fact that the base file format on the
| Mac with resource and data forks was much different, and then
| of course you were probably using different spreadsheet and
| word processing software. Overall it was just barely possible
| to share files if you really worked at it.
|
| What you tended to see was that most everyone used PCs except
| certain industries/jobs that needed the graphical capabilities
| of the Mac. For example, if you were in a newsroom, everyone
| would be using Macs because there really wasn't good desktop
| publishing software for the PC until about the early nineties.
|
| The Amiga had a niche in video production because there really
| wasn't anything comparable to the video toaster for the Mac or
| PC until much later. You'd also see various types of
| workstations used for CAD, and in the nineties, SGI was the
| only game in town for high end 3D graphics. Hardly anyone
| bought a NeXT because they were so expensive and therefore
| didn't have enough software. They were pretty good for rapidly
| developing GUI software though, so there were a few companies,
| specifically banks, that used some of them for internally
| developed software.
| Paul-Craft wrote:
| > Hardly anyone bought a NeXT because they were so expensive
| and therefore didn't have enough software. They were pretty
| good for rapidly developing GUI software though, so there
| were a few companies, specifically banks, that used some of
| them for internally developed software.
|
| Famously, id Software also developed Doom on NeXTSTEP.
|
| https://doomwiki.org/wiki/NEXTSTEP
| cameldrv wrote:
| Also the original web browser, WorldWideWeb was on NeXT,
| but hardly anyone used it because hardly anyone had a NeXT.
| prometheus76 wrote:
| Another reason is because the simple text-based interfaces and
| terminals are also much more responsive. Some people prefer a
| snappy response over constantly moving their hand between the
| keyboard and mouse.
| kjellsbells wrote:
| This is massively important, especially for line of business
| apps or tools that the user touches hundreds pf times a day.
| GUIs are great when there are multiple, equally likely paths
| that the user could take. But LOB apps tend not to be like
| that: there is a mainline path (or very small number of
| paths) that dominates all others, and apps that let the user
| keystroke/tab/enter their way through these hot paths are
| waaaay fast.
|
| For US people, look at how fast the employee in your local
| Costco can look you up on their ancient-looking text app.
|
| You can do this in a GUI, or at least, you could in native
| apps, to some extent, with a series of tab presses to
| traverse the interface, and in the peak VB5 era this wast
| kinda ok, but not great, and webapps are a hot mess for this
| use case. If I'm shopping for flights, a gui webapp is great:
| lots of paths are valid, and i can poke around. If I'm a gate
| agent looking for the last seat on the plane out of O'Hare, I
| want speed.
| toast0 wrote:
| Typically, the TUIs are also really good at consistently
| handling input, so even when they do get behind in processing
| the input, you can keep typing, and it will buffer inputs and
| catch up. There's often an attention key which is _not_
| buffered, and will dump the input buffer and stop any
| operations in progress, in case something is stuck.
|
| Even if a GUI does buffer input, it's unusual for users to be
| comfortable clicking where the buttons will show up, before
| they do. More frequently, click processing is separate from
| whatever else, and early clicks (or taps) are ignored or
| directed elsewhere.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember watching clerks at Fry's Electronics I think it
| was - they had PCs with windows on them, but all they ran
| was some sort of terminal emulator to access the system
| mainframe or whatever.
|
| You could ask them for a pick slip for whatever, they'd
| turn around, ask your name, type everything in in seconds,
| and then turn to the next customer; the computer would
| slowly plug along through all the screens and then print
| out the slip. They knew all the commands that far ahead.
| toast0 wrote:
| Yeah --- Fry's used to be all real terminals, but I guess
| they ran out of equipment, so they ran a terminal
| emulator in Windows instead (almost always full screen,
| but modal popups from the printer? would break it out so
| you could see it was Windows). And the sales and returns
| terminals were usually setup so you could see them work.
| Cash registers were under the same system, but you
| usually couldn't see those. Word on the street was one of
| the Fry brothers had written that system, I think the
| server was a PC in the store somewhere (they did have
| _some_ ability to check other store inventory, but I don
| 't know how realtime that was)
|
| Airline service desks and vehicle/driver licensing are
| also popular places to have a well developed TUI along
| with experienced operators that will queue up a large
| buffer of inputs.
| bombcar wrote:
| At a company years ago we had a GUI that worked "well
| enough" but the dirty secret was it just sent keystrokes
| to an older TUI program that the C-level had decided was
| "too old looking and slow".
|
| A TUI isn't that far from an actual API, after all.
| xp84 wrote:
| It always warms my heart to see these classic TUIs on a
| screen at a place like an airline service desk or a
| store. (Same as the non-IP Nortel Norstar phone systems
| that are 25 years old but still work that are in most
| supermarkets and department stores)
| masfuerte wrote:
| GUIs used to handle keyboard input consistently so you
| could type ahead, even into future dialog boxes, if you
| weren't using the mouse. Unfortunately, this tends to be
| broken for modern GUIs using async frameworks.
| bombcar wrote:
| People forget that back in the days of Dos and early MacOS,
| people rarely _switched_ - the waves were new people coming
| into the market that would often sway which was burning up the
| world.
|
| Software was _expensive_ back then, too, many hundreds of
| dollars that you really really wanted to keep running.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| The way I remember it was that people often did use other
| platforms but Microsoft won largely because IBM lost control of
| the PC market allowing for hundreds of cheap clones.
|
| It wasn't until the mid 90s when PCs started to feel like the
| more capable platform.
|
| It's also worth noting that there is a reason Microsoft offers
| heavy subsidies for education: it's because if you indoctrinate
| people into your platform early on then they're likely to keep
| buying your platform for years to come because change is scary.
|
| Edit: just to add some context, this is the point of view from
| England. Sounds like Apple had (and possibly still has?) a
| bigger presence in schools in the US. Whereas over here Apple
| machines were relatively uncommon compared to many of their
| counterparts.
| bombcar wrote:
| Which was funny to me because it wasn't until well past 2000
| that any of my educational systems were Windows; grade school
| was Apple IIs and early Macs (one was color!) and high school
| had higher end Macs.
|
| Cheap clones able to run 1-2-3 was a big part of it, but the
| real lightning bolt for everyone I knew was Windows 95 and
| the Internet. And most of the kids I knew would push their
| parents towards the Windows for the games.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| In U.K. it was really common for people to have 8-bit
| micros even into the late 80s. Typically Amstrad and
| Commodores (with machines from Sinclair before that) while
| schools had BBC Micros (from Acorn). Though there was a
| plethora of machines around at that time that most people
| have since forgotten about, like the Dragon 32 / 64.
|
| Europe, and the U.K. particularly, had a really strong
| computer hardware industry in those days. In fact France
| has the Minitel which is itself a really fascinating
| technology and shaped early French computing trends in a
| differ way to England and USA too.
|
| Going back to the U.K., you'd see a few people, usually
| people with a little more money, but Atari or Amiga
| machines but more often people jumped from C64 or Amstrad
| CPC micro computers to IBM-compatible PCs. There definitely
| were people who had an Apple Mac, but it wasn't the norm
| where I lived.
|
| Showing my age a little here, but my high school still ran
| Windows 3.x (I don't think it was even 3.1. Pretty sure it
| was 3.0 on 286s). It was all Microsoft Office too. I ran
| Lotus at home but Microsoft Word and Excel had already
| conquered the schools, at least from what I saw. But we had
| Corel Draw instead of PowerPoint. Not sure why. Maybe
| PowerPoint hadn't been released yet?
| cronix wrote:
| > It's also worth noting that there is a reason Microsoft
| offers heavy subsidies for education: it's because if you
| indoctrinate people into your platform early on then they're
| likely to keep buying your platform for years to come because
| change is scary.
|
| That was Apple in the tail end of the 70's and 80's. Just
| about all grade schools where I am had Apple ]['s and few to
| no PC's. Apple heavily discounted the hardware and software
| for education. It was the same through Jr. High and High
| school (graduated in '90), except by then we had Mac's in the
| school "labs." As a kid and teenager, I didn't even know
| there was an IBM or Microsoft until the 90's. Everything was
| Apple in education. I was heartbroken to receive a 386sx/16
| for my graduation present as I was heading off to software
| engineering in college. Until I got to college and hardly
| anyone had Apple's and the whole college was IBM clones.
| xp84 wrote:
| I had a similar experience in the early 90s (II followed by
| 68K Macs (LCIIs) and a few molar macs), but by '98 (HS for
| me) they were buying pallets full of Gateway and Dell
| desktops which gradually replaced the Mac labs.
|
| My guess on causes in no particular order:
|
| 1. Apple got stingier in the discounting
|
| 2. They faced more aggressive competition from PC vendors
| and weren't willing to eat any additional margin by
| increasing their subsidy
|
| 3. What I suspect is the case: Schools looked around,
| compared Windows 95 vs Mac OS 7 and 8, looked at Apple's
| business marketshare (nil) and their shrinking consumer
| marketshare, and concluded Apple was lost in the wilderness
| and teaching kids to use Macs was pointless. Even as an
| Apple admirer at the time (couldn't afford one though) I
| can understand the decision.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Are you American? Macs were much less common in Europe and
| particularly in England. In fact England had its own
| educational computer in the 80s as a venture between then
| BBC and Acorn, the company that invented the original ARM
| CPUs.
| cronix wrote:
| Yes, this was in Portland, Oregon (and Beaverton)
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Interesting. Just goes to show how regional differences
| vary so much back then. I had no idea schools were
| running Macs before today :)
| jasim wrote:
| Can anyone explain the deep nostalgia and longing for old DOS era
| software, and in particular VGA text mode interfaces?
|
| I love staring at these screenshots and spinning up a DOSBox
| every now and then and going thru 1-2-3, FoxPro, WordStar and so
| on.
|
| I don't know what I'm looking for from them, does anyone else
| have a clue?
| cesarb wrote:
| > Can anyone explain the deep nostalgia and longing for old DOS
| era software, and in particular VGA text mode interfaces?
|
| Nowadays, our computers have instant access to an uncountable
| amount of storage, information, and software through the
| Internet, and even local storage is enormous. Back then, the
| world was much smaller; the software and data you had in your
| small hard disk and boxes of floppy disks (and perhaps tape,
| etc.) was all that you had, and you didn't have a constantly
| online network to distract you with an unlimited fire hose of
| nonstop information.
|
| That led to a closer relationship between you and the software
| on your computer. You had time to explore each and every corner
| of the software, and to read its manual (be it in the form of
| an online help or a paper book) from cover to cover. The
| software stayed the same; there was no automatic online update,
| no security scare blaming you for staying on a release that's
| more than a day old. You knew your software and hardware
| limitations, and adapted to them; they would stay the same
| until you bought more hardware, or new software (which came in
| colorful physical boxes, that you could put on a shelf).
|
| We have gained much since, but lost some of that sense of
| wonder, of making the most of memory and storage measured in
| megabytes or even kilobytes, processors with speeds measured in
| megahertz or even kilohertz, and displays with few lines and
| columns of characters and little color.
| JamesAdir wrote:
| You wrote it beautifully and if I can add - software then was
| a tool. Like a good old hammer. You only bought a new one
| when needed, or a different type for a new task. Today,
| software is a service.
| eddieroger wrote:
| > Can anyone explain the deep nostalgia and longing for old DOS
| era software, and in particular VGA text mode interfaces?
|
| I can only speak for me, but perhaps others feel the same way.
| It is nostalgia for me because this is the first way I
| experienced a computer, when everything was new to me and
| anything was possible. Until we got a computer, the only window
| outside of the world of my city was a TV, but a computer ran
| software of all sorts, and games, and others knew how it worked
| and could teach me stuff. Then the Internet came and I could
| talk to people anywhere in the world! What a thing this was.
|
| Now, I spend all day looking at screens. I get paid to make
| them work, and that's cool, but the wonder and magic of it all
| is gone, and I miss it. DOS and text apps just happened to be
| my first interface, and everyone longs for their first love.
|
| On a slightly more tactical angle, I really like typing and my
| keyboard, and terminal apps make it so I don't have to move my
| hands to a mouse and change contexts. A small thing, but it
| adds up. Yes, some stuff is easier with a mouse, but it's
| always fun to not have to change between input devices for long
| stretches of time.
| hnlmorg wrote:
| Two very good reasons. I agree with this but I'd also add:
|
| When you use a computer every day then sometimes anything
| that is different feels novel. It might be the nostalgia of
| an older UI or it could be listing over something new but yet
| to be released.
| sldjfkdsljffkjd wrote:
| Depends on the person. I too find myself looking at text
| interfaces into this or that every once in a while but always
| come back to the same few tools: Weechat (for Slack), w3m
| (browser that I'm currently replying on) and vim. More recently
| I've been experimenting with Word Grinder which is very
| powerful but I don't know if it's as safe as Google Docs with
| respect to auto saving.
|
| For me, I use these tools in my daily life because the normal
| internet is just too damn noisy and gamified and addicting. I'm
| big on the slow internet movement and browsing the internet in
| w3m is a huge boon to focusing on what really matters: the
| words.
| bombcar wrote:
| It's a limited interface (80x25, 16 or 256 colors) and major
| companies spend millions of dollars over 20+ years perfecting
| the interface for those things. They were top tier and felt
| humanly understandable.
| xp84 wrote:
| To illustrate: In a DOS or terminal interface, a date field
| usually expected a certain format, made that format obvious
| in the UI, and you'd type the date with probably 6 keystrokes
| (numbers) (and it'd probably jump the focus right to the next
| field if you needed to enter more). And likewise, good
| software would find a reasonable way to fit everything
| possible on one screen.
|
| With 'modern' web-based business software, most of them
| implement a date field with a pop-up mousing widget. You may
| or may not be "allowed" to type at all, or it may not be
| obvious how to, and you might need 47 mouse clicks and 15
| seconds to enter a DOB in the 1970s. And screens are usually
| not laid carefully out at all, so even with small amounts of
| info on the screen, there may be plenty of whitespace,
| necessitating scrolling back and forth constantly.
|
| A phone number field, likewise, may throw errors for using or
| not using the "expected" punctuation. Etc.
|
| Stuff like that would be considered an absolute failure in
| the old text interfaces but it's the norm now that UIs are
| clunky and inefficient.
|
| PS: None of this would be difficult in the web stack, it
| seems like the "UI/UX" designers (when they even exist) care
| exclusively about aesthetics.
| josteink wrote:
| > Can anyone explain the deep nostalgia and longing for old DOS
| era software, and in particular VGA text mode interfaces?
|
| I'm not using any of those _other_ old things you mention, but
| I love how I can run my full Emacs-configuration locally in a
| TTY, remotely over SSH or whatever with no loss of
| functionality.
|
| Having that capability is IMO a strength, not a weakness, and I
| wish more software was like that.
| [deleted]
| LVB wrote:
| There is a definitely an element of pure nostalgia from growing
| up with those programs, but I think there is a bit more to it.
| For me it evokes memories and feelings of _focus_. Just look at
| all of today 's IDEs and note application that offer
| "distraction free" or "typewriter" modes that are echoing
| simpler interfaces of old. And as another commenter mentioned,
| these apps were extremely capable and polished. So when I'd sit
| down to write my papers in high school, I'd open up WordPerfect
| and it alone would do everything I needed, and there was
| literally nothing else running so I just sat down and wrote. I
| don't achieve that sort of single-task work style very often
| these days.
| guessbest wrote:
| DOS or more specifically MS-DOS was the platform on which the
| TUI, terminal user interface, applications ran. Because MS-DOS
| lacked universal drivers for printers and networking as well as
| being single tasking, it was up to vendors to provide the
| printer drivers, network stack as well as TSR, Terminate-and-
| stay-resident, programs to allow switching between
| applications. For most people a computer was just a function of
| their job and not a career, so using a single tasking program
| to edit a spreadsheet and sending it to someone on portable
| storage like a 3.5" floppy drive seemed normal. Most meetings
| were in person and rarely did meetings happen over group calls.
| MS-DOS represents that world for the majority of people working
| with computers in the 80's. Also, there was smoking indoors.
| 0xdeadbeefbabe wrote:
| The MSDOS manual is really good too. Some of the trees used
| for cigarette paper were also used for books.
| jmclnx wrote:
| for me you had direct access to the hardware, that made writing
| software a bit fun. In some cases you had to jump through hoops
| which added to the excitement.
|
| Plus almost anyone could write programs, I saw some amazing
| programs created as COM files.
| danielrpa wrote:
| Speed, responsiveness, uncluttered UI.
|
| I AM AMAZED that the average Pascal program of the day compiled
| faster on my old 386 than the average program compiles today in
| the latest and greatest workstation. Also don't get me started
| on cloud remote desktops. Go compare the immediacy of this
| garbage vs an old DOS computer in most applications.
|
| About the UI... Dozens of flashing buttons, toasts and pings vs
| a Zen interface where you can, well, just focus on work.
| joecool1029 wrote:
| I added it to the Gentoo GURU overlay (still pending on dev
| branch). Will fit along with DBF/libdbf as formerly common 90's
| software available to install.
|
| EDIT: Oh wait, this is lotusdrv. I haven't added that yet. Added
| the previously discussed linux native version of lotus123r3.
| qingcharles wrote:
| This man is doing God's work. Bless him.
| phoe-krk wrote:
| Lotus 1-2-3 was on the frontpage six days ago[0]; this is a
| different article, about a new rendering driver for it,
| supporting larger terminals!
|
| [0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35807639
| helloooooooo wrote:
| Same author though, Tavis Ormandy.
| dang wrote:
| Thanks! Macroexpanded:
|
| _Lotus 1-2-3 for Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35807639 - May 2023 (73
| comments)
|
| Also related:
|
| _Original killer PC spreadsheet Lotus 1-2-3 now runs on Linux
| natively_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31583982 -
| June 2022 (1 comment)
|
| _Lotus 1-2-3 For Linux_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31455968 - May 2022 (83
| comments)
|
| _Lotus 1-2-3 arbitrary resolution_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26316637 - March 2021 (123
| comments)
|
| _Lotus 1-2-3 DOS Development Encyclopedia_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26312681 - March 2021 (1
| comment)
|
| _Lotus 1-2-3_ - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26304542
| - March 2021 (1 comment)
|
| _Rediscovering Lotus Agenda (MS-DOS, 1989)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=24862343 - Oct 2020 (11
| comments)
| josteink wrote:
| This is the most amazing hacker story I've read in a good while.
|
| Can't wait to hear how this ends up eventually!
| bombcar wrote:
| Speaking of Lotus 1-2-3, the best computer I have ever owned was
| the HP 200 LX Palmtop - https://www.palmtoppaper.com
|
| It was about the size of a graphing calculator, and ran MS-DOS
| 5.0 with a black and white CGA display, and had Lotus 1-2-3 and
| rudimentary task-switching.
|
| Simply phenomenal for 1994. Nothing has ever really come close;
| maybe someday I'll modify one so I can use the keyboard and
| replace the screen with a modern phone.
| thelastparadise wrote:
| I was about to make the same comment. It was a remarkable
| machine. I remember buying it in 1995. It was so small that it
| could fit into a shirt pocket. I was in college at the time,
| and I remember that I had an old Radio Shack dot matrix printer
| that I could hook it up to. It was a real step up from the
| TI-85.
| bombcar wrote:
| I remember printing to certain HP printers that had an
| infrared port - such amazing capabilities.
|
| It still feels more capable to me than things like the
| Raspberries Pi.
| GeorgeTirebiter wrote:
| Beat me to it! ;-) I continue to use my (three!) HP 200 LXs in
| different parts of my lab for different reasons. The most 1-2-3
| stuff is for analyzing S Parameters and other RF tasks
| (conversions, ratios, formulas, Smith Charts).
|
| Two AA batteries power it for a least a month; you could
| recharge NiMH with the built-in charger if you wanted. I use
| the PCMCIA card slot to hold a battery-backed SRAM, allowing
| complete backup (via automatic macros) of the entire machine
| (dead main batteries are not killers, here in the pre-FLASH
| world).
|
| And, the comm -- you can plug a special cable in to get 115,200
| serial port. And you have IrDA --- I wrote the very first IrDA-
| compatible 'stack' on that machine (and at the time sold
| compatible discrete IrDA HW, so you could attach to another
| end, e.g. a PC).
|
| Sorry to highjack a 1-2-3 thread with praise for the HP 200 LX,
| but that was ( _is_ ) one HELL of an awesome machine, still in
| use in my lab to this day.
| russnewcomer wrote:
| Somewhere between 2010 and 2012 when doing small business IT
| support, for a client, I spent some time installing 1-2-3 on an
| old, mostly disused machine in a corner of their office, then
| connecting to the machine via LogMeIn on an iPad (I think DosBOX
| because it better supported something on LogMeIn, I honestly
| don't remember why not CMD.EXE) so that this customer, a medium
| sized construction sub-contractor, could continue to use the
| 1-2-3 based estimation spreadsheet that had been developed in the
| early (yes, early, it might have been converted from visicalc)
| 80s. I offered to instead convert it to Excel since it wasn't
| really that complicated, but the response was basically "That's
| probably better, but I've been doing this since the 70s and I'm
| going to retire soon, I don't want to learn more new things that
| I don't care about instead of getting jobs done as fast as
| possible."
|
| It's not that 1-2-3 or a TUI was better, but that if you know it
| and you don't care about it, you care about it.
|
| Worse is better.
|
| And so it goes with apologies to Mr. Richard Gabriel, but that
| experience helped me more deeply understand what software should
| do is do important things for people, not do things better.
| thisgoodlife wrote:
| If I were the customer, I'd reject your proposal too. The old
| software has been working fine for 40 years, why would I want
| to find someone to rewrite it?
| jandrese wrote:
| In this case it would be to prepare for the inevitable death
| of the last machine in the office that can actually run it.
| bombcar wrote:
| The death of the user is more likely than the death of the
| ability to run the spreadsheet; updating can wait until
| that time if necessary.
| icedchai wrote:
| With emulation, it can run forever.
| squarefoot wrote:
| And faster, safer and future proof. I wouldn't be
| surprised at all if most 30+ years old software ran
| better on modern machines under a VM than say on 15 years
| old hardware without emulation.
| danielrpa wrote:
| This just reminds me something I bring up to my development
| team. The point of software is to serve humans, to make their
| lives better. You should avoid spending time solving problems
| created by yourself, the programmer.
|
| I think about this a lot when I see UI redesigns that "look
| fresh" or "updated" while actually reducing productivity and
| degrading the life of the humans who need computers to get
| stuff done. All for some vague concept from the head of a
| "visionary" who often doesn't use the system to solve the
| problems it is meant to solve.
| hggh wrote:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?q=https%3A%2F%2Flock.cmpxchg8b.com%2...
| squalo wrote:
| Murdered by IBM (I've been murdered)
| tpmx wrote:
| _I got another stroke of luck, I found a third party printer
| driver on an old SUNET archive for the Siemens Highprint 7400.
| Remarkably, it had some ancient Codeview debugging data left in
| it._
|
| I quite like the anti-deletionists at the Academic Computer Club
| in Umea, Sweden. I had a similar experience a while ago - they
| were _only_ ones currently hosting a once (well, somewhat)
| ubiquitous file.
|
| https://ftp.sunet.se/
|
| SUNET is the name of the Swedish University NETwork. They
| operated ftp.sunet.se with a public archive starting 1990. In
| 2016 this academic computer club took over the hosting. They get
| the bandwidth from their university for free. Their machines are
| typically previous-gen donations from local companies. Oh, and
| the local university tends to cover the electricity costs as
| well. As well as the costs of the server room. Sysadmining the
| service is done by volunteers though.
| KMnO4 wrote:
| I'm too young for Lotus 1-2-3. Or at least, I should have been.
|
| I worked at a factory in 2011 that _still_ used Lotus on their
| ancient dinosaur because why fix what wasn't broken? The task was
| mostly just to record the values measured from a QC device in a
| spreadsheet, and print out a report for each batch. Since the
| computer didn't have USB, printing involved saving the PDF to a
| floppy disk, running it across the factory to the printer, and
| inserting it into a USB-Floppy reader connected directly to the
| modern office printer.
|
| Honestly, I was really impressed by how functional Lotus was for
| such old software. The majority of tasks I was used to in modern
| Excel were doable in 1-2-3, and it could even do several things
| that _still_ aren't possible on Google Sheets.
| aleph_minus_one wrote:
| > The majority of tasks I was used to in modern Excel were
| doable in 1-2-3
|
| Work for a few years in the finance or insurance industry, and
| this opinion of yours will likely change: people in these
| industries have a tendency to (ab)use functionalities of modern
| Excel a lot. :-)
| yjftsjthsd-h wrote:
| So that's another point in favor of 1-2-3;)
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